4
When would the old dialogue with Krantz resume?
The lake was beautiful in the evening. Frogs went off like coiled springs.
When would they sit beside the water like small figures in a misty scroll painting, and talk about their long exile? He wanted to tell him everything.
Krantz lectured the counsellors on Indoor Games for Rainy Days. Krantz prepared a days-off schedule. Krantz set up a new buddy system for the waterfront and drilled the counsellors for two hours. Krantz carried a clip-board and a whistle around his neck.
No crude bugle wakened them in the morning, but a recording on the PA of the first few bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto. Krantz’s idea. On the fifth morning of the pre-camp training programme which Krantz had instituted for the counsellors, Breavman knew that this particular piece of music had been ruined for him for life.
Well, Krantz was busy. And there was this girl, Anne, who had followed him from England. Thank God she wasn’t beautiful. She was a modern dancer.
After the organization was completed and the kids arrived, things would run smoothly and they would repair their old commentary on the universe.
Krantz explained the American game of baseball.
“If a guy catches a ball after it’s hit, the batter’s out.”
“That sounds rational,” said Anne, and they hugged.
He hoped the dialogue would begin soon, because there was nothing he liked about camp. Obscene. He felt it the minute he arrived. There is something obscene about a rich kids’ camp. Something so obvious it disgusts. It’s like an amusement park, like rows of elaborate pinball machines. He looked around at the playing fields, handball-courts, bunks, boats — receptacles to hold children for a summer, relieve parents. Gangrene in the family. Living rooms back in Montreal were stinking with twisted intimacy.
He was glad that four hundred miles away Shell was waiting.
The counsellors were on the dock, lying in the sun. Breavman surveyed the flesh. Soon it would all be brown, bronze would grow around the bra straps. Now they were city-white. How the pines must despise them!
Breavman looked at a tall girl named Wanda. She was sitting at the far end of the dock, dangling her toes in the water. She had good legs and yellow hair but they didn’t whip him. She wasn’t quite in the great golden tradition. Wanda, you’re safe from Breavman.
All the girls were very plain. And this was the joke. He knew what two months in that community would do. He’d be writing sonnets to all of them. These poems-to-be made him tired.
The Laurentian sky was jammed with stars. Breavman, who didn’t know the names of constellations, judged confusion to be an aspect of their beauty.
“Counsellors’ meeting,” Krantz called up to the balcony.
“Let’s not go, Krantz.”
“Brilliant idea, except that I’m chairman.”
As they walked to the Counsellors’ Lounge they were joined by Ed, a first-year law student at McGill.
“First guy to make it with Wanda gets it,” Ed proposed. “I mean, it’s a matter of time. We’re all going to make her before the summer’s over, it happens every season, but this way one of us stands to collect.”
Breavman hated that kind of young-buck talk. He wished he had the courage to smash his face. Maybe Krantz would do it. He was supposed to be a lover now.
“I suppose you’re wondering how we can be certain when the first man claims the money.” Ed, the legalist, explained the silence of the other two. Breavman searched the silence for their old unity.
“I think we can trust each other,” said Krantz. “Breavman?”
Breavman called their attention to a falling star.
“A contract of cosmic significance.”
They agreed that five dollars each would make the pool worthwhile.
What did you expect, Breavman, reunion on a windy hill, a knife ceremony and the exchange of blood?
5
The bus depot was a chaos of parents, children, fishing rods, tennis racquets, and bewildered dogs dragged to see their young masters away. Mothers who had been awaiting the great day for weeks were suddenly stricken with a certainty that their babies would starve without them. A special diet was pressed into Breavman’s hand along with a five-dollar bill.
“I know you’ll look after him,” a woman shouted hurriedly, scanning the crowd meanwhile for someone else to bribe.
Fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure Breavman sneaked into one of the empty waiting buses. He closed his eyes and listened to the confusion beyond the window. What was he doing with these people?
“My name is Martin Stark. Capital S, small t, small a, small r, small k. No e.”
Breavman wheeled around.
In the seat behind him, sitting very stiffly, was a boy of about twelve years. His eyes were incredibly white, not naturally, but as if he were straining to show as much white as possible. This gave him an expression of having just seen a catastrophe.
“Sometimes I spell it with an e and then I have to tear up the page and begin again.”
He spoke in a monotone, but over-articulating each word as if it were an elocution lesson.
“My name is Breavman. Capital B, small r, small e …”
He had been warned about Martin, who was going to be one of his campers. According to Ed, Martin was half-nut, half-genius. His mother was supposed to be ashamed of him. At any rate she never came on Visiting Day. Today, Breavman learned from the boy, she had come an hour early and deposited him in the bus with the command not to stir. Thus she avoided meeting the other parents.
“I’m your counsellor this summer, Martin.”
Martin registered no reaction to this information. He continued to stare beyond Breavman with a kind of vacant, unchanging terror. He had a bony face and a great Caesar nose. Because he generally clenched his teeth when he wasn’t talking, the lines of his jaw were severely outlined.
“What’s your favourite store?” asked Martin.
“What’s yours?”
“Dionne’s. What’s your favourite parking lot?”
“I don’t know. What’s yours?”
“Dionne’s Parking Lot.”
The questions
